Flying without wings.

This time of year, as the evenings draw in and the mornings get colder, I always think that a holiday in the sun might be a good idea, but we never actually get round to having one because my husband is even tighter than I am and the thought of spending hard earned money on lazing about on a beach somewhere gives him the hee-bee jee-bies.

Because of his aversion to pleasure in the sun we haven’t been abroad for four years. This obviously gives me the moral high ground when it comes to the subject of flying, something I exploited fully recently when I castigated my sister, who has logged up six flights in three months, telling her, in the most sanctimonious of fashions, that flying is the single worst thing she could possibly do if she wants a decent future for her children. It fell on deaf ears.

‘One of them was a mini-break,’ she replied. ‘And you’re just jealous because you go on staycations.’ I was speechless and I don’t know whether it was because her protestations that actually made herself look worse or her knowledge of holiday company terminology, which laid bare just how often she goes on holiday.

Mini-break? What on earth is a mini-break? It sounds like a chocolate bar. I’ve heard of the holiday term ‘short break’, which I believe is normally between 2-4 days. So a mini-break must be shorter than that, which means it has to take up just one day. By that process, it would make it a daytrip, then, wouldn’t it?

And what the hell is a staycation? I have holidayed in the UK for the last four years. I have not, and will never ‘staycate’. The very word makes me feel sick. I like words and I’m not against creating new ones. I even tried to create one myself a year or so ago, but didn’t use it often enough for it to spread into common usage. But fusing two words together, one which is an American term and not used over here until staycation was invented, in order to create a new funky-sounding holiday term is an absolute no no.

It’s down there with frenemy and webisode and the person who invented it can take a staycation mini-break to Brighton and take a long walk off a short pier.